Improving customer care with SamKnows

We’ve spent the past 12 months wrestling with an existential crisis…

SamKnows creates measurement tools to help ISPs and regulators improve internet performance and customer care. But as we were going about our daily business of inventing tests and dealing with masses of data we had an epiphany. Whilst we’ve dramatically improved the richness and accuracy of internet performance intel, the actual customer support process hasn’t changed in almost 20 years.

This bolt from the blue hit us last year, to the day.

And while we’re proud of what we’ve empowered so far — new regulation, policies, advertising standards and new ISP products — we think it’s time to do more. So we asked ourselves, how can we reinvent customer care?

We started by analysing the most common customer care workflow:

A customer calls the customer team.

A scripted and often time-consuming dialogue is started.

Maybe a router is rebooted.

Certainly a speed test is run.

Often there’s no resolution so an Engineer is called out.

Maybe the router is replaced.

The case is closed, but rarely resolved.

The familiar dance wastes too much time, which is the most precious thing of all. Well, aside from love, and family, and holidays, and chocolate…

We imagined a new care workflow. Abandoning our existential crisis, we rolled up our sleeves and spent the last year developing features to help ISPs provide fast, efficient, (and less expensive) solutions for when your internet connection needs some love. We’ll tell you more soon.